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After Five Years of Tragedy, Irish Play It for Laughs

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Well, I see where the University of Notre Dame has given the farewell performance of The Damnation of Faust, a football opera in five acts where everybody dies in the end. It’s too early to tell who lost his soul.

It was hard to take Gerry Faust seriously with that bowl haircut right out of the Gay ‘90s and that Hail Mary approach to football. Gerry always managed to look as if he just fell off a hay wagon, the kind of guy you’d sell a vegetable peeler to. He led the league in looking thunderstruck on the sidelines. He always seemed to be running around looking for somebody to explain to him what the hell was going on. Coaches fought to get on his schedule. They figured Gerry Faust’s game plan was light a candle.

But, now what do we get at the Institute of Our Lady of the Lake, comedy? You look at the new coach and your first thought is, “My God, it’s Woody Allen!” You have to stop yourself from asking, “What’s the matter--was Rodney Dangerfield busy? Red Buttons? Henny Youngman?”

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Notre Dame is going to play it for laughs? The hallowed institution that saw George Gipp, Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen is going to be a minstrel show? They’re going from “Hamlet” to Mack Sennett? What’s next, a laugh track?

Some guys are coaches’ coaches. Lou Holtz is a comedians’ coach. Gerry Faust gave ‘em scripture, Lou Holtz will give them one-liners.

Notre Dame hasn’t had a coach who was funny, on purpose, since Knute Rockne. What made Gerry Faust so endearing was, he didn’t know he was funny. Like Inspector Clouseau, he couldn’t understand why things kept blowing up in his face.

What’s Holtz going to do--throw pies?

Lou is the most un-coachlike mentor you’ll ever see. During a game, he paces up and down the sideline like a caged leopard. He logs more miles than a drum major. He says it’s because he doesn’t want the alumni to get a clear shot at him, but it’s more like he can’t bear to look at what’s going on on the field. If he sits down, he’ll start to scream.

It’s not hard to see why Notre Dame wanted Lou Holtz. It’s less easy to see why Lou Holtz wanted Notre Dame. It’s hard to be funny when you have the shade of George Gipp on your hands. It’s hard to make jokes about shaking down the thunder from the sky for loyal sons on high.

Notre Dame is chronically in the grip of an athletic schizophrenia. It likes to win. But it likes to make friends. It has more than a reputation to serve. It has a religion.

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The two aims are antithetical. It’s hard to make friends of people you beat 27-0. Knute Rockne was the last coach to bring this off. Rockne could whip ‘em--and leave them laughing. Or crying. Rockne was like Chaplin. He could mix humor and pathos like a master. He could make it an honor to get beat by him.

Good coaches, like Dan Devine, and genius coaches, like Frank Leahy, couldn’t bring this difficult double off, not even winning 85% of their games, as Leahy did, nor 75%, as Devine did. Notre Dame wants its coaches to do banquet shtick, too. It wants to preserve its image of the wisecracking Irishman given it by the Celt from the fjords of Norway, Knute Rockne, or that wit from the Protestant belt, George Gipp. Notre Dame needs a little Take-my-wife-please! in its program.

Will Lou Holtz be able to bring it off. Well, Lou left ‘em laughing at William & Mary (where, he likes to point out he had less difficulty coaching William, Mary was the hard part) North Carolina State, Arkansas, Minnesota and the New York Jets.

But life wasn’t all seltzer squirts and baggy pants and fake glasses. Lou had to stop being funny on at least one occasion in his career.

It happened in 1977. Lou was coaching Arkansas, and they were to play Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. Oklahoma was 11-1 and ranked No. 2 in the country (right behind the Pittsburgh Steelers) and they were favored by anything from 16 points to infinity.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, two weeks before the game, Holtz got the really bad news. Two of his top running backs and a wide receiver got caught bringing girls into the dormitory in violation of the school’s rules.

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Holtz promptly suspended them from appearing in the Orange Bowl game.

They sued. Sixteen black players on the squad threatened to walk out unless they were reinstated.

Skeptics thought Lou Holtz had put them up to it. He hadn’t. He told them to go ahead and boycott. They didn’t.

Two days before the Orange Bowl, the courts upheld Lou Holtz. On New Year’s Day, his team did. They won, 31-6.

Coach Holtz doesn’t always play it for laughs. But at Notre Dame, they could use a yuk or two about now. Holtz is OK for that, but personally, my choice for the job would have been Eddie Murphy. Now, there’s a guy you’d like to hear give the George Gipp speech!

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